Notes for September 2023

This is sort of a catch-up, since although I have decided to stop publishing weekly notes I am still writing them, and there are a few things worth… well, noting.

I’ve decided that the Raspberry Pi 5 isn’t that appealing right now considering I can get an Intel N100 that runs much faster and at similar (or lower) power for the added cost of proper built-in storage, so I am consolidating things in Proxmox instances.

As part of that, and since I still need to build and run Linux ARM binaries, I finally upgraded my aarch64 Pimox to version 8.0 using a wildly unofficial set of packages and will be plugging its supporting SSD into an 8GB Pi 4. The plan is to wait until I can get something with 16GB of RAM and an RK3588 at a lower price point, which I suspect will be early next year.

I also (finally) set up Pi-Hole in a container on my Synology the “right way” (using a macvlan interface) and have been working my way towards wiping and rebuilding my last remaining Ubuntu server.

As a side note, I caved in and got a Radxa Zero to upgrade my travel kit, and so far it is a massive improvement performance-wise. A post on that is forthcoming.

Now that the KP3S Pro is tuned, I have been tidying my office and parts storage with more Gridfinity bins. But, more importantly, I have started doing more “proper” CAD, so I’ve started moving away from OpenSCAD for things like designing enclosures and tweaking existing models.

There’s still no clear winner software-wise (and I am still not touching FreeCAD), but there is a workflow pattern emerging, and I will be trying out OrcaSlicer 1.7.0 again to see if it does any better than the older versions.

Besides cleaning up old code, I’ve been poking at a bunch of things of interest, from LLMs to Godot (thanks, Unity), as well as microcontroller stuff. I feel the need to do some intricate low-level development, but haven’t settled on a long-term project yet.

Oh, and Starfield is definitely not my thing. I don’t think I played more than a couple of days.